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Jaggar: Hausa Loans, Inherited Forms; 28/01/2011 1 Jaggar: Hausa loans, inherited forms; 28/01/2011 1 THE ROLE OF COMPARATIVE /HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS IN RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST : * WHAT BORROWED AND INHERITED WORDS TELL US ABOUT THE EARLY HISTORY OF HAUSA PHILIP J. JAGGAR , SOAS 1. INTRODUCTION Hausa, with perhaps as many as 40 million first-language speakers (within the Afroasiatic/Afrasian phylum only Arabic has more), is by far the largest of the 130 or more languages which constitute the Chadic family. Hausa covers most of the northern and western extent of the family, across northern Nigeria and into southern Niger. Chadic languages also extend into northern Cameroon and western and south-central parts of the Chad Republic, and hitherto unknown languages are still occasionally discovered. This area is one of the most linguistically complex in Africa, and is the location of languages belonging to three of the four great phyla as postulated by Greenberg (1963)—Afroasiatic (e.g., Hausa), Niger- Kordofanian (e.g., Fula(ni)), and Nilo-Saharan (e.g., Kanuri). The two major subclassifications of the Chadic family are Newman (1977, 1990) (both refinements of Newman and Ma 1966), and Jungraithmayr and Ibriszimow (1994), and between them they classify Chadic into four branches: West Chadic-A (including Hausa, Bole/Bolanci), West Chadic-B (Bade, Ngizim, etc.), Biu-Mandara = Central Chadic (languages in northeastern Nigeria, e.g., Tera, Margi, and northern Cameroon), East Chadic (western Chad Republic, e.g., Kera), and the closely related Masa group (western/central Chad Republic and northeastern Cameroon). See map 1. MAP 1 (see end of file below) about here ----> Unlike the well-known and well-researched Indo-European language family with its long literary history, and for which we have a specified and extensive corpus of informative lexical evidence, there is a relative paucity of (reliable) historical/linguistic documentation for the languages of sub-Saharan Africa—most are either undescribed or underdescribed. Because we cannot directly evaluate inferences, therefore, our understanding of the history and phylogenetic affiliation of the languages is limited, as is our knowledge of natural language phenomena such as semantic shift, phonological change (in pronunciation), morphological additions, and regular sound correspondences across languages. 1 Sounds and meanings erode over time, and lexical items are replaced, making the task of reconstructing linguistic history still more problematical (this is even the case for Indo-European, see Ringe et al. 2002). These same constraints also apply to Hausa, despite the fact that: (a) it is the best- researched sub-Saharan language, with three recent substantial reference grammars (Wolff 1993, Newman 2000a, Jaggar 2001; see also Newman 1991); and (b) Hausaists have at their disposal lexical and grammatical resources extending back over 150 years (the first published combined Hausa grammar/vocabulary was produced by Schön in 1843), in addition to some *Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Dymitr Bondarev, Murray Last, Paul Newman, Russell Schuh, and Lameen Souag for comments on an earlier version of this paper. 1 Despite our limited understanding, African languages have played a major part in the formulation of models of language change, as well as providing insights into linguistic behaviour—a number of recent theoretical approaches, for example, have been proposed by phonologists researching African languages (see the various chapters in Heine and Nurse 2000). Jaggar: Hausa loans, inherited forms; 28/01/2011 2 historical linguistic information available from Hausa documents in Arabic script ( ajami) .2 Because of these restrictions, much of what we can confidently reconstruct for Hausa linguistic history is deducible from the comparative study of Hausa and related Chadic languages as they are spoken now, then projecting backwards to the probable ancestral patterns.3 Gregersen (1977:144) writes: "Athough little is known of the history of African languages, they in turn have proved to be of considerable importance in reconstructing African cultural history." Although this observation might seem to be little more than a statement of the obvious, the reality is that the potential contribution of comparative-historical linguistics to the scholarly debate is often ignored—it was conspicuously absent, for example, along with archaeology, in the title of the initial meeting which has produced the papers in this collection, i.e., "The Emergence of Hausa Identity: History and Religion"! (Ironically, linguistics has possibly played a greater than normal role in our understanding of prehistory in the area because the archaeological evidence is patchy.) Why is linguistic history important? Because positing genetically related languages requires us to infer that that they must all derive from a single ancestral source—a presumed protolanguage spoken by a particular speech community in a specific place at a specific time. When the community geographically separates, the nuclear language changes over time in each of the new communities until speakers of the new varieties can no longer understand each other and new languages are formed. Communities spread beyond their geographical homeland perhaps because of external pressure (e.g., conflict with other groups, conquest), natural disasters, climate change, in search of land/food, or because of population saturation and a simple need to expand. Hypothesizing genetic unity on the basis of shared ancestral vocabulary and morphological paradigms sheds light on the culture and history of the 2See, for example Prietze (1907), whose Hausa-speaking assistant, Alhaji Musa, marked the contrast between the native retroflex flap / r/ (using Arabic ād) , e.g., raanaa ‘sun, day', sarkii ‘emir', and the historically more recent tap/trill /r/ (= Arabic rā). The /r/ phoneme entered the language through Arabic, Kanuri and English (in addition to language-internal processes), e.g., (Arabic ) ridda ‘apostasy', hà ram 'unlawful', (Kanuri) rùbùutuu 'writing', (English) sakandà rèe 'secondary school' (see Newman 1980b for details). Transcription: aa = long vowel, a = short, à(a) = low tone, high tone unmarked; r = tap/trill, r = (native) flap, , , = glottalized. 3As regards the etymology of the term Hausa / hausa / itself, several proposals have been floating around for a number of years and surface now and again, with varying degrees of plausibility. Skinner (1968) suggests it derives from Songhai hausa (no tones/vowel length provided) meaning 'east', but Heath (2005) gives the meaning as 'north (bank of the Niger River)' (Lameen Souag, p.c.), and transcribes it / hausa /, i.e., identical in all respects to the Hausa term, making it a possible candidate. Far less convincing is Abraham's (1962: iv) fanciful claim that hausa "derives from Arabic al-lisa n, Hebrew hallashon" meaning 'tongue'. The language name has nothing to do with these two Semitic words, but the corresponding Hausa word harshèe 'tongue' does of course—it is fully cognate with the Semitic terms and is a reflex of Proto-Chadic *alsi which in turn (like Semitic) goes back to Proto-Afroasiatic * lš or * ls . Another suggestion is that the source of the name is the Hausa word for 'Ethiopia'—Habashà . Whatever its historical merits, however, this proposed etymon runs into major linguistic problems, e.g., inter alia , (a) there is no motivation for the /sh / segment to change (depalatalize) to / s/, (b) the tone on the final / a/ is different, (c) there is no reason why the / b/ in Habashà should weaken to / u/ in hausa . In short, we know what its derivational history is NOT , but we are still not sure what it IS . Jaggar: Hausa loans, inherited forms; 28/01/2011 3 speakers of related languages (with the obvious proviso that traces of cognacy gradually disappear with the increasing separation of languages over time). Sound changes, for example, can sometimes help us establish the period when certain words were first borrowed into a language by establishing relative chronologies for historical developments. An account of Hausa identity which did not include consideration of the origin, classification and evolution of the language itself would therefore be as incomplete as a characterization which failed to include religion as a salient factor. There are other components in a comprehensive approach to the problem. In order to form a coherent picture of the remote past (migration, technology, contact, trade, religion, etc.), and shed light on phylic dispersal, ideally a synthesis of archaeology, ethnography, and linguistics is needed (Blench 2006:3ff.). Human genetics will surely also make an increasingly important scientific contribution to the debate once we have a sufficient body of samples of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences permitting phylogeographic analysis across a range of ethnolinguistic groups. The present paper reinforces the importance of linguistic input from comparative reconstruction, and is aimed principally at non-linguists whose knowledge and understanding of the methodologies used, of family tree models and the genetic classification of Hausa, vary considerably (at times alarmingly) in my experience. (In fairness I recall being largely unconcerned myself about such questions in my former life as an anthropologist!)4 The paper is also mainly derivative, drawing especially on the influential works of leading Chadicists such as Paul Newman and Russell Schuh—empirically-driven specialists in the languages and cultures of the area who
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